


snowdrops so still

by TittyAlways



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Canon Compliant, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-11 20:32:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11722017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TittyAlways/pseuds/TittyAlways
Summary: White petals falling from his lips. Adoration, appreciation, purity, love. Bouquets strangling the beats of his heart, a pink rose resting on his tongue. You made flowers grow in his lungs and although they are beautiful, he can't breathe.He choked on his words, and a carnation fell from his lips.I love you I love you I love you.Won't you please stay as sweet as you are?





	snowdrops so still

**Author's Note:**

> SLAMS THIS DOWN i find trope stories like this rly difficult to come up with for some reason, but uuuhhh hey im pretty proud of this. sry it took so long lmfao i was messed up by the latest chapter, took a while to take in everything that happened so i could, like. put it into fic. 
> 
> anyway, if u have any questions about flowers and symbolism in this fic please feel free to ask!!! im suddenly very passionate about floristry lmfao
> 
> twitter: @TittyAlways  
> tumblr: tittyalways/titty-now-titty-later

It felt like vines coiling around his heart, roots settling deep in his lungs, and Tyki imagined he might be able to ignore that tentative bud of emotion. It was ridiculous. It was _nothing._ It was just a boy worthy of interest, and Tyki’s own insatiable curiosity.

He woke days after the battle in the new Ark with a sprig of baby’s breath in his mouth. After a moment’s heart-stopping terror (one would not believe how like a spider a sprig of those small flowers feels), Tyki settled back into the mattress with a quiet, pained sound, his throbbing heart bound tight by the boy’s Innocence. His arms, his chest, his shoulder. Still breathing a little uneasily, Tyki lifted the tiny, bruised spray of flowers, each barely the size of his little fingernail.

Road dozed beside him, undisturbed by his short, violent awakening. Head resting on her arms, folded along the edge of his bed. Flowers in his mouth. It was some ridiculous game of hers, no doubt.

Tyki twirled the stem between his fingers, dropped his hand to his chest and turned his head to the window. Warm sunlight crept muted through gauzy curtains, and when they shifted in a breeze tasting of salt he saw a flash of gold shattering off the ocean’s calm surface.

He couldn’t hear the waves, but every now and then a seagull cried.

His eyes slipped closed against the warmth of the Ark’s never-ending mid afternoon, exhaustion and dull pain and the pleasantness of the weather enticing him back into a doze. Swallowing down the urge to cough, Tyki let himself drift back to sleep, the tiny white flowers held absently against his blooming heart.

* * *

 

The niggling itch in Tyki’s chest sat there for weeks while he recovered, and when he told her about it Road took away his cigarettes. It left him idle, with too much discomfort sitting under his skin and nothing to do with his hands.

He forgot to ask her about the sprig of flowers, and then it seemed irrelevant. They sat on his bedside, slowly drying and turning brown.

Tyki didn’t cough, for several reasons. Road watched him day and night with a burning kind of protectiveness, and the thought of giving her more reason for concern somehow made him nervous. And it _hurt._ His body hurt, his lungs hurt, and the scars the boy had left on him burned all the way down to his bones, to his marrow, even deeper.

So sometimes he took short, stilted breaths because that was better than wracking his aching chest.

Sometimes his heart felt sluggish, weighed down. Ensnared. This, perhaps, concerned him the most. And so it was of this that he never breathed a word. He imagined it to be the boy’s Innocence nestling deep in his body, festering in him like a virus. The thought made his lips twitch with distaste, but only because his innate reaction was to be _glad_.

He choked in his sleep, when he couldn’t control those sharp, careful breaths. He heaved and struggled to breathe and curled in on himself against the pain of it, and when he woke up none the wiser, dozing in mid afternoon sun, there was a daisy on his pillow and Road was nowhere to be seen.

* * *

 

The plan was elaborate and had far too many goals, so naturally it was a mess. Everything _kind of_ happened, but nothing _really_ did.

They woke Alma Karma up, sure enough, and let it disappear. They captured the thirds, and Tyki felt he might like to kill that shapeshifting spirit stuck obstinately in his way. Cut off at every turn, and but for her his path to the boy was clear. Frustration burned like hatred in his blood, and to say he’d recovered from the battle in the Ark might have been a stretch.

Physically, he was almost fine. Mentally, he could play it off. But his tenuous grip on _Joyd_ was in no way helped by the tightness in his lungs, the bitter anger at the guardian, the way his heart was pounding heavy and laboured in his ears. His job was to get the boy, but he couldn’t even get close.

He was glad he wasn’t the only one who stopped when that uncharacteristically cold laughter echoed across the wasteland in his voice. Terror, it seemed, was an effective way to combat Joyd’s incessant gripe for control.

Panic clenched around Tyki’s heart and his lungs seized. His hand went to his chest, fingers digging against his skin while his shoulders shook, throat worked to heave air into a body too filled with that gross, consuming fear.

Watering eyes on the boy’s Noah-dark skin, the inhumane smile stretched across his face, and Tyki’s fingers dug against his sternum like he wished he could plunge his hand through his chest and remove whatever was obstructing his-

Tyki clenched his eyes shut, mouth twisted in a grimace while he sunk his fingers beneath his own skin, past muscle and bone and hardly-pumping blood, and stilled when his fingertips brushed against velvet as delicate as butterfly wings. Leaves and slender stems, roots tangled like angel’s hair, woven into the lining of his lungs.

A bud, a bloom, under his hand. There wasn’t enough room for air. He curled his fist around the stem, choked back a scream when he wrenched his hand from his chest. It snapped, and the immature roots pulled at his lungs.

Hand to his mouth, coughing and coughing and sucking in hardly enough air, spitting out blood, thankful only that he hadn’t torn his lung open, Tyki let the air hold his unsteady body and squinted through teared-up eyes at the flower in his hand. Disbelieving.

A white daffodil, its petals grown perfect in the space beside his heart.

Tyki closed his eyes, pulled in an unsteady breath. Couldn’t let himself look at the boy when he wore a smile like that. Bitter, twisted. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t _right._

It wasn’t _him._

* * *

 

Road found him out on the balcony of his room, elbows propped on the balustrade. He twined his empty fingers together, and wished he had something to smoke.

“I think we did alright today,” she said, quiet and reserved. She hadn’t left the earl’s side since they’d returned to the ark with the thirds. He must finally be sleeping.

Tyki didn’t respond. Just pulled in a quiet breath through the foliage whispering in his lungs and wondered if she’d seen the daffodil on his bedside table, laying next to the dried-out sprig of once-white flowers.

“Tyki,” she reprimanded and draped her arms around his neck, hung herself from him, toes barely brushing the ground. “Are you upset we didn’t get Allen?”

He swallowed back the flowers that bloomed in his chest, couldn’t hold back his small pained cough at the horrible sensation. “No,” he answered after a moment, voice weaker than he intended. It wasn’t a lie. Not really. They didn’t want _Allen._ It wasn’t Allen who they’d have brought back.

“Liar,” she muttered, and slipped off him to her feet. Tyki glanced down at her, watched how she folded her arms along the balustrade and rested her chin on them to pout out at the glittering ocean. It hadn’t been a turn of phrase, he realised. She meant what she said. _Are you upset we didn’t get_ **_Allen?_ **

He glanced away, swallowed back against the discomfort of having flowers grow where there ought not be seeds. There was no soil in there, no sunlight. It was hard to breathe through all those beautiful, suffocating petals. He kept his eyes low on the climbing hydrangea which clung to the stone of the building.

“I think there’s something wrong with me,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to do. “I think I’m...” he began, but shook his head with a choked laugh because he didn’t even know how to finish that thought.

He looked back to the little girl, concern pinching her sharp brows. Worry was not a good look on her. It made her sweet face go sour. “What do you mean?” she demanded, on edge, and he reached out to take her hand. Guided her fingers to sink beneath his skin so she could feel the vines coiled around his heart, the delicate network of roots. A garden of leaves in his chest, clover carpeting his lungs. Buds and blooms that he didn’t dare weed out.

“Road,” he pleaded, voice strained hoarse and almost scared, and she carefully pulled her hand away. “What’s happening to me?”

“Tyki,” she murmured, and she looked so burdened. So heavy and sad, and the way she said his name sounded like there wasn’t anything for it. She cast her eyes down to her hand, a three leaf clover held carefully between her fingers. “Oh, _Tyki.”_

Pathetic.

It wasn’t even lucky.

She gave him back his cigarettes, and he chain smoked to choke them out. Burn them down, whither them dry, coat them in tar that they might just _die._

He coughed and coughed and coughed, so hard he couldn’t breathe, and caught snapdragons in the hand he cupped around his mouth.

* * *

 

It wasn’t exactly a volunteer job, but Tyki had some kind of insight into why the earl had he and Road be the ones to retrieve Allen. Tyki didn’t know what exactly Road’s motives were, but if any of the twelve were likely to bring Allen back as unharmed as possible - or, for that matter, _alive -_ Tyki probably would have counted the two of them amongst the more reliable.

The fight with Apocryphos had been short and confusing in the confined space, adrenaline and Joyd’s pleasure singing high in his veins. A mad dash straight up into the air hadn’t been what he’d call _fun,_ and the bloated golem was far heavier than strictly necessary. Too much weight on hands that Apocryphos had pierced against the prison wall, but Tyki didn’t dare let his grip falter.

They ran, and Tyki didn’t let his eyes linger on the boy’s back. There were more important things to focus on, and he could feel something uncomfortable growing in his chest, stifling his lungs.

Breaths were coming short and tight, and Tyki found he almost didn’t mind. This was how it was meant to be, right? This was how it should have been. Allen, running with them.

Allen, trusting them.

The same way flowers were growing in Tyki’s lungs, a familiar protectiveness grew throughout his limbs. The ferocious caution, same as the dread that had punched through his gut when Apocryphos had struck Road. This was how it was meant to be.

_I would kill for you._

The thought wasn’t quite his own, but he found he liked it. Tyki wasn’t particularly fond of Joyd but, well. Noah’s memory had its moments.

Short-lived, of course. Of _course._ Tyki should have been more surprised that he even got a few bare minutes of something approaching comfort with the boy. They were meant to be enemies, after all. Maybe they still were.

The idea sat uncomfortable and heavy in the pit of his stomach.

Tyki’s eyes fell to his arm, glowing white and bursting misshapen with trailing feathers. The boy’s hand was curled around his upper arm, fingers buried deep in the ruffled plumage, and Tyki’s eyes darted to his jaw, caught the pained grit of his teeth.

“Your arm is telling him where we are,” he said, voice unwavering despite the riot of growth in his chest. He took a step forwards, lifted a hand towards the boy.

His expression flickered suspicious caution and Joyd seized Tyki with his intent. They darted towards him, hand closing around the painfully white feathers. Stepping quickly, Tyki swung around the boy, brought his other hand up to make it something like an embrace.

Arms wound tight around the boy and for a moment it wasn’t violent. It wasn’t gentle. Breaths coming tense and quick from the boy, stilted and choked from Tyki, and it was _intimate_ for a moment. Quiet and wonderful, one black-dipped hand curled around the boy’s elbow, the other poised. Close. Hesitating.

Despite Joyd edging at his control, despite the threat of Apocryphos and the burning of Allen’s Innocence under his hand, Tyki noticed how the boy’s back felt pressed against his chest, had a moment to realise his skin was cool beneath all that Innocence.

“I’ll rip it off,” he breathed past the petals unfurling at the back of his throat, flowers softening the harsh growl of Joyd’s words spilling past his lips.

The boy wrenched away from him, but his moment’s hesitation in Tyki’s arms hit harder than the elbow he drove into Tyki’s sternum.

He gasped for a winded breath, choked when the fluttering petals caught in his throat. Coughing air he didn’t have out of lungs more forest than functional, Tyki staggered back with a hand pressed over his mouth. Flowers worked out of his convulsing chest, spat up into his palm for his need for air.

Tyki twisted around, turned his back to the boy and pulled his hand away from his face, sucked in a staggering, stilted breath and looked down at the petals in his hand. Delicate, white, edged in pink. He swallowed back the discomfort lingering in his throat, the flowers that wouldn’t stop growing for this boy until he was dead. Closed his hand around the petals of the sweet pea, kept them tucked in his palm as ridiculous as he knew it to be.

“I’m not like you, Tyki Mikk,” the boy said, his voice edged in pretentious disgust. “You Noah are monsters.”

Tyki had to laugh at that no matter how much it hurt, his contradictory amusement catching on flowers and foliage and shuddering the soil of the garden he carried in his chest. “Have you seen yourself lately?” he returned, and his laughter was a touch bitter when he caught the surprised look on the boy’s face.

* * *

 

“Can’t you just pull them out?”

Tyki grimaced and opened his mouth, reached to the back of his tongue and picked out a rose petal. The softest powder pink, unmistakeable. He’d been waking up with them piled in his throat for weeks now. “Not exactly,” he enunciated, and shot Wisely a scathing glance, dropping the petal into the trickling fountain water behind him.

“You _are_ the Noah of Pleasure though, aren’t you?” he pressed, elbows resting on his knees and his pointed chin cradled in his hands. Tyki couldn’t tell if he was trying to be cute, or if that was just the way he was. Like Road.

He also couldn’t tell if he’d rather be on this mission with her, or if he was thankful she hadn’t recovered enough from Apocryphos’ attack to create a real body.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Tyki muttered, because of course he’d tried - of _course._ Over the past few months he’d taken a shot at anything that came to mind, and nothing had worked. Not to say he _couldn’t_ just pull them out. If he wanted to take the bottom of his lungs out with them. Wisely didn’t look convinced. “They’re _part_ of me,” Tyki tried to explain. “They didn’t come from...” he gestured vaguely, “elsewhere.”

“So…?” Wisely trailed, tilting his head from side to side while he absentmindedly scanned the crowd.

“I can’t just phase through it,” he reasoned, impatience with the questions winding his jaw tight. “If you could see what’s in there,” he gestured vaguely to his chest, where stems had come to branches and vines had grown their thorns, roots reaching thick and deep, all but replacing the floor of Tyki’s lungs. The roses had recently come into bloom. “It’s a lost cause.” He sighed, and it sounded faintly of rustling leaves. “I’m more plant than person. I’d almost say they’re keeping me alive, at this point.”

Wisely sat up and planted his hands at the edge of the fountain they were sitting at, leaned back a little as he swung his legs. “Well,” he huffed, and glanced down his nose at Tyki - a look he had long since recognised was designed only to stir him up, “pessimism won’t change anything.”

Tyki worked a velvet pink petal into his mouth and spat it sharply at Wisely’s polished shoes. “Get fucked.”

“There he is,” Wisely sang, unconcerned, and nodded through the crowded city square, filled with people milling about.

Sure enough, the moment he glanced in the direction Wisely had indicated Tyki’s eyes caught a flash of silver-white hair tied up with a red ribbon. Back turned, buying meat from a street butcher’s cart. His smile, when he turned to tuck the paper-wrapped parcel into his tattered bag, was worn around the edges. His eyes were tired, his clothes were old. At first glance he had such an air of being put together that it seemed to outshine his frayed tie and worn down posture.

Every time Tyki saw him he was a little bit shabbier, a little bit worse for wear. It wasn’t concern that Tyki felt, though. A kind of… subdued pride, almost.

Three months. Three months, and he was still here. He was still _him._

Tyki winced and pressed a gloved hand to his chest, stifled a coughing fit into his fist and grimaced when he shook the handful of dust pink rose petals into the fountain.

“You know,” Wisely hummed, and plucked one of the petals from the water, “they say different flowers mean different things.” Tyki coughed up another few velvet petals when he scoffed. Wisely inclined his head towards a lady across the square, working to sell bouquets from her cart. They were pretty, Tyki supposed, but he found he’d rather grown sick of seeing blossoms. His chest was a garden of white and pink and he didn’t at all want to think about what that might mean. “Do you _admire_ him, Joyd?”

Tyki’s mouth twisted down at the edges. He didn’t like the name, and he didn’t like the insinuation in the comment. His pride prickled him like one of the thorns wedged in his beating heart. _“Admiration,”_ Tyki said slowly, twisting it with distaste, “is a strong word.”

“Hey, now,” Wisely waved the petal at him scoldingly, a teasing smile on his face, “you don’t have to look up to someone to appreciate them.”

“They’re just plants,” Tyki bit out, and snatched the petal from Wisely’s fingers. “Stop reading into it.”

* * *

 

It was a habit he’d gotten into, plucking petals from flowers growing just below his collarbones while he lay in the warmth of a mid afternoon that never came to evening and tried to lull himself to sleep. The hope was that without petals the flowers couldn’t choke him in his sleep, but the blossoms were always back by morning, trapping his throat with thick velvet and delicate silk, and the ritual had come to feel like something else.

_He’ll make it through. He’ll be destroyed. He’ll make it through. He’ll be destroyed._

Daisy petals fluttered to his chest one by one, and Tyki fancied that the chant usually went very differently.

Now when he coughed it was a whole bouquet of flowers that came tumbling from his lips. Snapdragons and sweet peas, daffodils and daisies.

Tyki traced his touch up the woody stem of the rose bush, fingers slipping easily over the smooth bumps of up upwards-facing thorns. The bloom was impressive - petals splayed, it was easily as large as his open palm.

It was hard to pull them out, yes. Uprooting them was impossible. Tyki didn’t quite know why he hadn’t pruned this one from its stem. It _was_ hard to breathe around, and the tiny thorns were vile if he wasn’t sitting just so.

Carefully, fingertips catching on the sharp points, Tyki traced the winding, sharply-angled stem down through the carpet covering of clover and found where it joined to the knotted mess of roots tangled around inside his ribcage.

Blind surgery, pricking his fingers on thorns, Tyki snapped the rose from its woody vine with a choked grunt of uneasy pain, and lifted it out of his chest.

He let his head fall back and pulled in a deep lungful of air - it almost felt easy after so many weeks of foreshortened breaths.

A new one will have grown to replace it by morning, but for the moment Tyki rolled onto his side, closed his eyes and slept somewhat easy for the first time in months, a dust pink rose in his hand and daisy petals he didn’t have to ask for answers falling to lay amongst his sheets.

_He loves me not, he loves me not, he loves me not._

Not that it mattered any. There were more important things, after all.

* * *

 

He called himself Neah D. Campbell, but a rose of any other name, and all that.

Tyki hated the way he wore that boy’s face.

He could feel his daffodils protesting the Fourteenth, sinking their roots deeper in his chest, and Tyki turned his head aside with something like disdain. Huffed something casual and dry when he brought the cigarette to his lips. How was he _possibly_ going to get all the way up there?

Lifting his foot up into the empty air, Tyki tucked his hands into the pockets of his coat and took easy steps up to the roof of the building. “So you’re that Fourteenth I’ve been hearing so much about,” he commented lightly, an indulgent grin showing his almost sarcastic amusement. “It really is confusing when you’re wearing that young man’s face.”

Tyki’s eyes pinned narrow suspicion on the cold-eyed boy, his smile unaffected, and felt he didn’t owe this changeling child the unvoiced respect of even footing that he’d have afforded the boy he was destroying. Took another step higher and decided to stop there, felt a vicious swell of petty smugness when Neah D. Campbell tilted his chin up a little to keep that hateful stare pinned on Tyki from the corner of his eye.

Something about his expression suggested a sneer, and Tyki let his smile stretch razor sharp when he offered, “What say you we go back together and we can discuss things as a family?”

Joyd was being difficult but Tyki was used to it, and didn’t let the lurch he felt in the pit of his stomach show on his face when Neah D. Campbell’s icy expression twisted and metamorphosed into something far too similar to the boy’s pretty false smiles.

“Disqualified,” he called out, voice painted too cheerful for his position.

Tyki arched a brow and reached up to take the cigarette from between his lips, let the smoke trail from his overgrown lungs and waited with an uncharacteristic patience for the Fourteenth to explain himself. There was no rushing these things. He was here half to indulge the traitor, after all.

“You’re disqualified,” he repeated simply, unnerving gold eyes slipping open while he sharpened the boy’s smile like a blade on stone. “And that C.R.O.W. over there,” he gestured behind the building he was standing on with a casual tilt of his head, “who fancies himself my _ally.”_

Tyki felt his gut clench something unnatural at the scathing way the Fourteenth shaped that word. _Ally._ Tyki wouldn’t say he knew much about the boy that he could put into words, but hearing something so cold come from his mouth paired with a word that, for him, was synonymous with _friend..._

No, this was not Allen Walker. There wasn’t a shred of him left.

“He’s disqualified too.”

Tyki brought a gloved hand to his mouth, struggled to restrain the overpowering urge to fall to his knees and beat his chest, cough and choke and tear out the daffodils rioting in his chest. Roots digging deep, stems crawling up his windpipe, flowers closing off his throat.

He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t _breathe,_ and Neah D. Campbell’s cold gaze was unwavering.

“And as for joining you for _dinner,”_ he laughed, as biting as a winter wind, “well. Looking at all your faces, I’d probably throw up everything I ate.”

He couldn’t breathe, could hardly think, and Tyki didn’t have a single clue why those words had Joyd bursting through Tyki’s fragile, distracted restraints, tearing at his skin. Twisting his body into hatred or madness.

His hand slapped to face, breathing forgotten for a moment in favour of cold-blooded terror, tearing Joyd away from his consciousness, beating the Noah memory down something brutal and effective like instinct before it could take that moment of weakness and consume him.

A lot happened right then, and Tyki was hardly of a mind to make any kind of sense of it all.

The boy’s outstretched arm shattered blinding light around them, layers of Innocence like a fan of feathers peeling back something grotesque and unnatural. The blond C.R.O.W. darted out with desperate warnings, too much duty and hesitation and fear keeping him rooted to the spot rather than charge at the Fourteenth. A man, there was a man who called the boy’s name.

Tyki choked, couldn’t breathe, his daffodils protesting and the rosebush wilting, vines turning dry and hard and shriveling tight around his heart. There was something in his lungs, there was _something in his lungs_ and it shouldn’t be there, it _shouldn’t_ and when Tyki managed to drag enough air into his cramped chest to bring about a coughing fit, the white daffodils that he choked out were spotted red with his blood.

Hand clutching his chest, eyes glazed with pain and a desperation for air, ears ringing with unnerving emptiness, Tyki could only watch with something worse than dread when the boy’s arm smoothed back to look how it should. His back turned, knees going slack, Tyki could do nothing but watch with a petrified yell choked off by the new buds forcing their way through the foliage in his chest. Sprouting, growing through the clover as it trembled and clutched at his heart like winter turning to spring in his hot, shuddering blood.

And that man - that man Tyki doubted to have looked at twice. He threw himself from the rooftop without a thought, the boy’s name tearing from his lungs in a scream of unrestrained desperation.

There was something growing in him that shouldn’t be, and Tyki should have torn these flowers out of his chest by the roots when he had the chance. Eyes glazed, pinned on the two of them falling, Tyki found he had never believed in angels.

That boy, though. That boy and his godforsaken Innocence.

Maybe he was the closest they’d ever get.

Petals bloomed out of the budded flowers in Tyki’s chest, maybe smaller than the rose had been, but so heavy with folded, frilled, paper-like blossoms that Tyki found it harder than ever to suck air into his broken-down body. Coughing and choking and desperate to tear them out before they could take root - too late, it was _too fucking late -_ Tyki plunged his hand into his chest, fist tight around the heavy flowers, crushing them, and his pained scream was silenced by silken snapdragons when he tore them from his chest.

The breath he sucked in caught and hitched, the unstoppable desperation birthing more of those too big, too heavy flowers even as he stared down in half-terrified incredulity at the bruised blossoms clutched in his hand.

Carnations spotted with blood, heavy in full bloom with something he should have weeded out a long, long time ago.

He coughed into his hand, coughed and coughed because they wouldn’t stop growing. They were killing him, they were _killing him,_ and when he pulled his hand away to suck in a staggering breath there was blood on his glove too.

Incredulous and more scared than he’d ever let himself admit, Tyki stared down at the boy, the angel, who had alighted on the ground as light as a petal falling from a freshly-plucked daisy.

 _He’ll make it through,_ that petal told him, and Tyki though he might know what those white carnations in his hand might mean.

_He’ll make it through._

_He’ll make it through._


End file.
